2.1. The Waste Framework Directive defines waste
as any substance or object which the holder discards or intends
or is required to discard.[1]
This definition, originally developed in 1975, has in practice
been further negotiated through case law at both a national and
European level. Once the waste label has been applied to certain
materials, strict criteria must be met and permits obtained in
order to transport, store and re-use them. The status of materials
classified as waste, and the point at which the "waste"
label ceases to apply, was a cause of much concern amongst our
witnesses. EEF, the manufacturers' organisation, claimed that
"the current regulatory framework presents a barrier to greater
resource efficiency, where a material cannot be re-used simply
because it is classified as a 'waste,' due to strict interpretation
of EU law" (p 116). A recent revision of the Waste Framework
Directive has therefore attempted to address these problems (something
which we explore further in chapter four).

2.2. The production, management and disposal
of waste is often described by reference to a so-called "waste
hierarchy." This abstract hierarchy can vary in its detail,
but usually contains around five different categories: waste prevention,
re-use, recycling, energy recovery and disposal (see Figure 1).
Broadly speaking, this categorisation places the five different
phases of waste management into their order of importance and
signifies the relative environmental gains that can be made at
each stage. In general terms, the hierarchy argues that most waste
could and should be prevented, so that the need for other options,
such as re-use, recycling and energy recovery would be dramatically
reduced. Thus it is argued, if our society was to implement the
hierarchy effectively, a far smaller amount of waste would need
to be disposed of after all the previous stages had been put into
practice.

Waste prevention refers to any activity which
avoids the creation of waste. This can be achieved through the
use of better design, improvements to manufacturing processes,
or by influencing consumption patterns. Waste prevention sits
at the top of the hierarchy and offers the greatest environmental
gains.

At the next level, once items have been used some
products and materials can be re-used, either for the same or
a different purpose.

The third level of the hierarchy is recycling
which entails bringing materials from a product back into use.
It is important to distinguish between recycling, in which the
material is re-used in a form which has equal properties to its
original form, and down-cycling, in which the material's properties
are reduced and the material cannot be used in its original application.

At the next level of the hierarchy, recovery,
value can also be recovered by generating energy from waste materials.

Finally, if none of the above options can be employed,
waste should be disposed of.

2.3. Taking a wider view, some suggest that we
should be aiming for a sustainable society in which no amount
of waste is acceptable. One of the most often cited definitions
of sustainability was first coined in 1987 by the World Commission
on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Commission). This
defined sustainable development as:

"development that meets the needs of the present
without compromising the ability of future generations to meet
their own needs."[2]

2.4. In a more recent report, Green Alliance
and the Institute for Public Policy Research put forward the concept
of a "zero waste" society.[3]
Green Alliance explained that in a closed-loop society, "it
may not matter how many products are in circulation, how much
resource they use, or how long they last, provided materials are
not lost from the system, and manufacturing, use and reprocessing,
are driven by renewable energy." This would entail the use
of simpler materials used in fewer combinations, with composites
having to be phased out. As they described it, "at the end
of a product's life, its constituent material would be easily
recovered and new product made using the same materials. Where
new materials were developed, the feedstock for the new material
would be taken from material recovered from discarded products"
(pp 282, 310). This idealistic vision for the future may
seem appealing, but it is arguable whether such an extreme view
of sustainability can ever be attained. Professor Mike Ashby
from the University of Cambridge noted that since the industrial
revolution our dependence on non-renewable materials has increased
rapidly and we are now consuming ever greater quantities of fossil
fuels and man-made polymers.[4]
As the world's population grows and living standards increase,
it is likely that more and more of the world's resources will
be used at an ever-increasing rate.

2.5. Green Alliance admitted that the notion
of a zero waste society was probably "physically and politically
unobtainable." Nevertheless, they argued that the idealistic
concept could still provide a valuable aspiration to work towards
and could contribute to changing attitudes. Ms Julie Hill, an
Associate of Green Alliance, said that it was crucial for people
to buy into such a vision because "if one had that political
will and had business buy-in, I do not think human ingenuity or
business ingenuity is any kind of constraint" (Q 546).

2.6. Whatever the analysis used, waste prevention
should be the ultimate goal for any government, business or individual
and approaches to waste have begun to change accordingly in recent
years. Attention is gradually moving away from the management
of waste towards a more holistic and sustainable approach. As
part of this, much emphasis is now placed upon assessing the environmental
impacts of materials and products throughout their entire lifetimes.
These could include the raw materials used, the energy involved
in the production, transportation, maintenance or use of a product,
or the types of chemicals or by-products emitted throughout its
life. With regard to waste, a complete life-cycle assessment (LCA)
of a product would examine the amounts and types of waste resulting
from the initial extraction and production of its materials, the
wastage during its manufacture or transportation and the use of
the finished product at the end of its life. As we explore in
chapter four, full LCAs are, in practice, extremely difficult
to calculate.

2.7. In 2007, the Department for Environment,
Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) published its Waste Strategy
for England.[5] This
identified that England alone produces around 272 million tonnes
of waste per annum, a figure which is continually increasing.
Despite the large amount of media attention paid to domestic waste,
only nine per cent of this total arises from households, with
the majority of the waste arising from demolition and construction
(32 per cent), mining and quarrying (30 per cent), industrial
(13 per cent) and commercial (11 per cent) sectors. Small amounts
of waste also arise from dredged material (five per cent) or agriculture
and sewage sludge (both less than one per cent).[6]

2.8. However, these percentages were calculated
using a number of different sources and there appears to be a
lack of comprehensive data on the variety of waste streams in
the UK. Ms Jane Bickerstaffe, Director of the Industry Council
for Packaging and the Environment (INCPEN), told us that the National
Household Waste Analysis programme used to systematically assess
waste from "a large selection of local authorities"
providing a comprehensive assessment of waste over "different
times of the year." She did not know why the programme had
stopped; her impression was that "the Government at the time
just decided that they no longer needed it." She added that
"there has never been the equivalent sort of analysis of
commercial and industrial waste streams. Frankly, the data we
have today has gone backwards from those days. We still do not
have good data on industrial and commercial waste and we have
less good data on household waste" (Q 520). Mr Chris
Sexton, Head of Engineering at Laing O'Rourke said that for the
construction industry, "hitherto the data has been weak and
looking backwards the picture is slightly opaque"
(Q 789). In terms of the amount of waste created by individual
products or waste streams in the construction industry, Mr Gilli
Hobbs, Director of Resource Efficiency at the Building Research
Establishment (BRE), added that "we do not know what the
wastage rate is overall because nobody has ever undertaken those
sorts of studies" (Q 749).

2.9. When questioned about the lack of data Ms
Joan Ruddock MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at
Defra, conceded that "we have got gaps" but rather than
attempting to "try to plug all those gaps" the Government
had decided to focus on priority waste streams, such as food waste,
and then "work on the reduction of waste within that particular
waste stream" (Q 817). Mr Malcolm Wicks MP,
Minister of State for Energy at the Department for Business, Enterprise
and Regulatory Reform (BERR) recognised that it was important
to gather data on commercial and industrial waste and told us
that studies were underway by Defra and BERR "to examine
what new data is really needed to support our policy objectives"
(Q 819). Concurring, Ms Ruddock admitted that "we are
not so confident about our statistics in the commercial and industrial
sectors as we are in the household sector, and so that is why
we want to do some of the plugging of gaps which my colleague
has referred to through collaboration between the two departments"
(Q 824).

2.10. We question whether this approach is the
right one. The selection of priority waste streams cannot be judged
effectively without substantial data on the whole waste picture.

2.11. Ms Ruddock felt that the introduction of
a comprehensive data-gathering system was "questionable"
because of the cost (Q 817). Currently, data on household
waste are collected via Defra's Waste Data Flow project, which
costs around £0.5 million annually and which the Government
claim "provides good quality information on a quarterly basis."
The Department of Communities and Local Government also conduct
a biennial survey on aggregate construction and demolition waste
which cost around £73,500 in 2005. Although comprehensive
surveys on commercial and industrial waste are no longer carried
out, a previous survey conducted by the Environment Agency had
cost around £3 million in 2002-03 (p 418).

2.12. The Government's Waste Data Strategy aims
to collect data on all waste "by utilising administrative
data sources" such as returns from waste facility operators,
rather than directly surveying businesses. By incorporating such
information with data from the Waste Data Flow project and Environment
Agency systems, they claimed that the strategy saved around £1-1.2
million per annum for respondents and central government in comparison
to conducting surveys. They felt that this figure could be "broadly
seen as the possible cost of moving back to a survey-based data
collection methodology," but added that this figure did not
include the existing cost of collecting municipal waste data and
that "there would be additional, unquantified costs for further
surveys on other waste streams such as non-aggregate construction
and demolition waste and agricultural waste which would be required
to give a comprehensive picture based on surveys" (p 418).

2.15. This directive was originally developed
in 1975 and provides the legislative framework for the collection,
transport, recovery and disposal of waste. Codified in 2006 and
revised in 2008, it requires all EU Member States to take the
necessary measures to ensure that waste is treated and disposed
of correctly, sets targets for re-use and recycling, and requires
Member States to draw up binding national programmes for waste
prevention.

2.16. These requirements are supplemented by
other directives relating to specific waste streams, some of which
are described below. Some of these directives involve the concept
of extended producer responsibility (EPR), which makes manufacturers,
importers and retailers accountable for their products and packaging
throughout their lives. In order to encourage businesses to consider
the end-of-life impacts of their products at the design stage,
EPR directives specify thresholds for the use of hazardous substances
in certain products and place obligations on manufacturers and
importers to collect and recover their products when they become
waste.

2.18. Under the Producer Responsibility Obligations
(Packaging Waste) Regulations,[9]
businesses which have a turnover of more than £2 million
and handle at least 50 tonnes of packaging in a year are obliged
to recycle and recover a prescribed proportion of their packaging
waste. This includes manufacturers, converters, importers, pack-fillers
and retailers. Businesses can either register with their
environmental regulator or join a compliance scheme to carry out
their obligations, which are based on the amount of packaging
handled the previous year. The Packaging (Essential Requirements)
Regulations[10] also
place a duty on businesses which design, specify, produce, pack,
fill or import packaging to limit the weight and volume of packaging
to the minimum adequate amount that will protect the product to
an acceptable standard whilst maintaining safety and hygiene.
They also oblige producers to ensure that their packaging can
be recovered or re-used and to ensure that it has a minimal environmental
impact after disposal.

2.20. The WEEE Regulations[14]
require producers of certain categories of electrical and electronic
equipment to register with a producer compliance scheme and pay
the compliance scheme to dispose of their waste products appropriately,
including the treatment, re-use, recovery or recycling of components
where necessary. The compliance schemes report to the environmental
regulator the amount of equipment every producer has placed onto
the market each year and the costs of disposing of WEEE are shared
between producers according to their market share.

2.21. As part of this system, distributors and
retailers of electrical and electronic products must implement
a system which allows household users to dispose of their products
free of charge, which they can do in one of two ways. The first
option is to implement their own in-store take-back scheme, where
waste products are taken from customers when they purchase a new
item. The second option is to join a distributor take-back scheme
which works through a network of designated collection facilities
at which consumers can dispose of their WEEE. Retailers must also
provide customers with information on the environmental impacts
of their products, the reasons for separating WEEE from other
waste and how they can correctly dispose of WEEE.

2.22. RoHS Regulations[15]
restrict the use of lead, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, mercury
and two flame retardants, polybrominated biphenyls or polybrominated
diphenyl ethers, in electrical and electronic products. Along
with the WEEE regulations, the aim is that the RoHS regulations
will encourage manufacturers at the design stage to consider what
impacts their products might have at the end of their lives.

2.23. The EuP Regulations[16]
allow the setting of requirements for designers to consider the
energy efficiency and environmental impacts of their products
at the design stage. It allows criteria to be set for energy-using
products which have a significant volume of trade in the internal
market and which demonstrate a clear potential for significant
improvements. The Government said that "the Framework Directive
does not contain any immediate obligations for manufacturers but
will enable detailed implementing measures to be brought forward
for specific products over time" and the Market Transformation
Programme (MTP) has been involved with European Commission studies
to identify the first set of products for such measures (p 6).